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Washington: President Donald Trump has backtracked significantly from his pledge to sign trade deals with other countries to reduce or eliminate tariffs, saying he will instead set a price to “shop” in the US, which he compared to a luxury department store.
In a lengthy monologue while meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in the Oval Office, Trump complained the media kept asking him about the deals he had previously insisted he would make with world leaders whom he had said were desperate for respite from his tariffs.
US President Donald Trump backed away from his pledge to strike new trade deals with America’s trading partners.Credit: Bloomberg
“Everybody wants to come and make a deal, and we’re working with a lot of different countries, and it’s all going to work out very well,” he said at a cabinet meeting in April.
But on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), the president indicated with a degree of frustration that the “deals” did not necessarily involve negotiation with other countries.
“We don’t have to sign deals. They have to sign deals with us. They want a piece of our market. We don’t want a piece of their market. We don’t care about their market,” Trump said.
“We’re going to put very fair numbers down and we’re going to say, ‘Here’s what we want, and congratulations, we have a deal’.
Donald Trump made the lengthy remarks on trade during a meeting with Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney.Credit: Bloomberg
“They’ll either say ‘great’ and they’ll start shopping, or they’ll say ‘not good, we’re not going to do it’. And I said, ‘That’s OK, you don’t have to shop’.”
Trump criticised the media for describing his processes as chaotic and implored journalists to stop asking when the deals – or the first deal – would be signed.
“In some cases we’ll sign some deals … For the most part, we’re just going to put down a number and say this is what you’re gonna pay to shop, and it’s gonna be a very fair number,” he said.
“They’re going to pay for the privilege of being able to shop in the United States of America… Think of us as a super luxury store.
“A store that has the goods. You’re going to come and you’re going to pay a price, and we’re going to give you a very good price.”
Tariffs on foreign products are not paid by those countries, but by importers, which in the case of the US are typically American companies or their agents. Trump’s comments expanded on his remarks to Time magazine in an interview for his first 100 days in office, in which he claimed to have already made 200 trade deals.
“The deal is a deal that I choose,” he said on April 22. “View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price.
“I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it… At a certain point in the not-too-distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries.”
It was not clear how these new tariffs would differ from the so-called reciprocal tariffs Trump announced on April 2, or “Liberation Day”, which generally ranged from 10 to 50 per cent. He reduced them all to 10 per cent the following week – except for China – after the share market crashed and US Treasury bond yields jumped.
Countries initially hit with higher tariffs moved quickly to open trade talks, including Japan and India. Australia – which only received the 10 per cent “baseline” rate – has not been active due to the election.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke with Trump on Monday morning, Canberra time, for a congratulatory phone call after his election win. Albanese said they discussed tariffs and the AUKUS defence pact during the “very warm” exchange, but would not provide details. The White House has not provided a readout of the call.
In his latest remarks, Trump indicated “deals” would be set by a team that included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior trade and manufacturing counsellor, was once again not mentioned.
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